My Gap Year

A few things among the many that I learned during my time in India:

•  If someone asks whether Indians drive on the left or right side of the road, the correct answer is “yes.”  Horn honking is so routine that it is completely meaningless – you never know if someone is honking at you because they’re trying to pass you while you’re walking or if the honking is just simply habitual.  The contrast between the quiet of places like Bhutan or Mongolia and the cacophony of India is headspinning.
• If you’re Western, no one believes you when you say you’d like your food spicy.  Whenever I’d order dishes that were described as spicy, at least 3 of the wait staff would check in on me throughout the meal to make sure that I was not in agony.  I’m not sure if my taste buds have dulled with age or what, but I never found the food in India to be as dangerously spicy as I had feared.
• Outside of the major cities like New Delhi or Mumbai, it smells.  I mean, really smells.  Consider the prevalence of motor scooters, tuk tuks and diesel engines, then add to that cows and other animals wandering the streets, then combine that with narrow streets with no cross-ventilation and pools of stagnant water, and then mix in throngs of people, street food vendors and fresh(ish) fruits and vegetables, and you get a distinctly pungent aroma.
• Despite everything I thought I knew, the caste system in India still exists.

That last one was particularly eye-opening for me.  Officially, discrimination based on caste is prohibited in the Indian Constitution, and “untouchability” was abolished in 1950.  The “architect” of the Constitution was Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, who himself was an “untouchable,” and drew upon the social inequities that he had experienced firsthand when addressing the issue of caste.

Historically, there are four primary “Varnas” – the Brahmins (priests, teachers and intellectuals), the Kshatriyas (warriors, kings and administrators), Vaishyas (merchants, traders and farmers) and Shudras (laborers and service providers).  Outside of this four-tier structure, there were also the Dalits – the “untouchables” (street cleaners, tanners and other jobs considered beneath the dignity of the other four classes). These are just the main categories – there are thousands of sub-castes as well.

While I was in New Delhi (where I began my India trip), I didn’t hear much about the caste system.  Once I got to Varansi, it was a very different story.  Varansi (or Baneras as it known by the locals), is generally considered the spiritual capital of India and sits on the Ganges River.  The city is devoted to the worship of Lord Shiva; dying there brings “moksha” – the liberation from the cycle of rebirth.  There are Hindu temples everywhere, and apparently the city is visited by around 1 million pilgrims per day!  Walking in the evening through the streets of the old city to the religious ceremonies conducted on the banks of the Ganges made me think the number of pilgrims was a huge underestimation.  In addition, people journey to the city to cremate their loved ones and have their ashes released into the river.

My guide in Varanasi constantly talked about the various castes, highlighting that the street cleaners and other menial workers were all of the untouchables class.  When I asked whether the caste system had any continuing relevance, I was told that caste factored most prominently in arranged marriages.*  The vast majority of the marriages in India are prearranged; sometimes the bride and groom never meet in person before the wedding.  Families are instrumental in making the right matches, and the concept of “courtship” is an anomaly.**

Every guide I had in India had an arranged marriage, and when I asked whether they were nervous getting married to someone they really didn’t know, I was greeted with blank stares that suggested that the idea of being troubled about making a life-long commitment to a relative stranger never occurred to them. The divorce rate among couples in arranged marriages in India is supposedly around 1% to 2%. Love marriages in India result in divorce about 20% to 30% of the time. Both of these figures are well below the U.S. average.

Again, as a generality, members of one caste do not marry outside their caste.  There’s no concept of “marrying up,” i.e., improving your social status by marrying someone of a “higher” class.  Likewise, there’s no way to escape your caste.  If you’re a Vaishya, you’re a Vaishya for life, and your children and their children and so on and so on will always be Vaishyas.

All of this struck me as so antithetical to society in America.  My parents (probably like most people’s parents) always told me that I could be whatever I wanted, as long as I worked hard enough. I suppose that’s true in India too, but regardless of your achievements, you are and will always be a member of your birth caste. Some things just can’t be changed.

That got me thinking about personal histories.  I was definitely shaped by my experiences growing up, some of which were what I think objectively could be viewed as traumatic.  I’ll get more into all of that when I write my book about my gap year, but, suffice to say, I learned more about being a parent by doing the opposite of what I had experienced as a child.  However, despite my best efforts, every now and again my parents would come out of my mouth:  “Walk it off.”  “Who’s the best father in the world?” “If you keep that up, I’m going to smack you.”  “If you don’t stop crying, I’ll give you something to really cry about.”  Each time that happened, I was mortified and struggled with massive waves of guilt and remorse. I did my best to restrain my impulses but can’t honestly say that I was always all that successful.

I remember my father always telling me, “I’m not your friend, I’m your father.”  As my sons got older, that statement got sadder and sadder.  The idea that one had to distinguish between one’s role as a friend and one’s role as a parent ignores the fact that sometimes you need to be both.  I’ve previously written about my reluctance to go to my parents with my problems for fear that I’d wind up worse for wear.  There was little tolerance for the things that made me different; as far as my parents were concerned, the rearing of children was a one size fits all concept.

I had to work very hard (and still do) to prevent the circumstances of my childhood from now controlling my life and dictating my behavior as a parent. I wanted my sons to feel comfortable letting me in to their inner lives, allowing me to be both a friend and a father.  I’ve learned a lot about how to be a parent from them (certainly more so than what I learned from my own father), and fully acknowledge that I still have a lot more to learn even though they rely upon me less and less. I think most parents want to see their children reach a level of success that exceeds their own.  While it would be nice to see them become more successful financially than I was, I’d think it would be even nicer if they could break the cycles of my family history and be successful in love, commitment and feelings of self-worth. 

Maybe you can’t escape your caste, but, with enough effort and consciousness, you can escape your past.  I’d like to believe I’m living proof of that.

*While legally it is prohibited to discriminate based on caste, the reality is that social stigma still attaches to the untouchables.  For example, with the right grades, an untouchable could get into medical school.  However, the standards for admission are weighted so that a student of the untouchable class has an easier time getting in (think affirmative action).  Notwithstanding the old joke that the doctor who graduates last in his class is still called “doctor,” there is a reluctance to see a doctor who comes from the untouchable class because the assumption is that he or she is less qualified than a doctor from a different caste.

**Interestingly, Yiddish culture has a similar concept.  My parents always referred to “making a shidduch” (not sure about that spelling), which historically was a highly organized system of matchmaking that prioritized compatibility, values, and family lineage over traditional “attraction.”  One making the shidduch serves as a bridge between two families.  These traditions are still followed in segments of the Jewish community. I found out that the rate of divorce among couples in arranged shidduch marriages is about 20% to 30%.